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Portraits William Dietrich

The Palouse Hills | From the grind of ice and stone grew amber waves of grain

Sometimes geology is like a box of chocolates: You never know what you're going to get.

The dust bin of the last Ice Age — all the silt and flour left by thousands of years of grinding glaciers at the top of Eastern Washington — wound up producing some of the most productive and beautiful wheatland in the world, the Palouse Hills.

Winds picked up the fine loess and deposited it in a gloriously rolling topography in southeastern Washington between Walla Walla and Moscow, Idaho, clothing the undulations with beautiful grass.

At first, even the pioneers assumed the oddly rolling terrain was good primarily for grazing. But in 1873, L.P. Beach, surveyor general of Washington Territory, set off a farm frenzy when he touted the fertility of the Palouse. Soil was sent to the Smithsonian for study of its unusual quality. Invention of a combine in 1891 that could harvest the steep sidehills made large-scale production economic.

Between 1890 and 1910, Washington added 100,000 acres of new wheatland a year, eclipsing California — which switched to irrigated fruits and vegetables — and feeding a Columbia River "wheat fleet" that peaked at 154 ships. The golden landscape was called "lonely, hard, heroic country" by novelist Zane Grey.

With exploit came problems. Serious erosion began to be arrested only in the 1990s with different plowing methods and "integrated pest management" that leaves some fields covered with stubble. Recent wheat prices have been more than double what they were two years ago, but decades of marginal prices have forced a steady loss of young farmers and an alarming aging of the farm population.

Still, combines draw intricate patterns like painted pottery each fall. In winter, snow pintos it. In spring, green wheat turns the hills into a rolling ocean of grassy swells.

The 19th century newspapers put it this way: "The best poor man's country in the world." And with today's giant farms, some of them became pretty darn rich.

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